31 May 2008

The Day Before

I finished packing.
I can't pull myself away from the computer now, I keep on thinking that I've forgotten something, that I missed some directions or something. But I haven't...I've written down instructions and prices and directions to almost everything in Paris.
My bags are packed and waiting along the wall to my room, my laptop is in it's bag thing.

The only things left are a pile of three english books I'm leaving here and a paperclip.

I'm starting to get nervous about being in Paris alone, though I know it will be fine.
More I'm worried about all my bags and how I'm getting them on and off the train, and then to the hostel and to the airport. It'll be fine, I know, but really...

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

30 May 2008

Packing

This morning I went with Sophia to the gare to help her get her suitcases on her train to Paris. It made me worry even more about how I'm going to get my bagages on and off my own train on Sunday. Michel and Elisabeth will be taking me to the gare to catch the train, so I'm not really worried about that part. It's the part when I have to get off the train, up the stairs to the métro, and through the métro to the youth hostel...with two large rolling suitcases, a mini duffel, and whatever purse type bag I have. Oh, and my laptop.

I had left the house before 8 to catch the bus down to the center, and it felt really weird after 9 heading back up to St. Grégoire. I felt like I was walking backwards, since 9 is usually about the time when I'm heading down to classes. When I got back home I made myself some tea and went in my room to begin the project of the day: PACKING.

It took me two hours to pull everything out, go through papers, organise stuff on my bureau...move the stuff to my bed...move the stuff to my desk... and then I looked out the window for a few minutes. My life is so exciting.

I do, however, now have a completely full trashcan. I'm very proud of this fact, mostly because it's full of school papers that I don't think are useful to me anymore. This idea makes me feel smarter, even though I don't feel like I've gotten better...in fact, my French feels worse. More about that later, though, when I have a tad more hindsight.

I ate lunch with mes parents and then set back to work trying to fit a semester's worth of my entire life into my suitcases. The funny part is that I'm planning on buying cidre at the marché tomorrow morning, yet I have no reason whatsoever to believe I will be able to fit it in my suitcases. Oh well, we shall see. I hope that it works, since of course I managed to fit everything but final souvenirs in my three bags. OH the amazingness of me!

The event of the day was the opening of Michel's art atelier expo. Atelier is a fancy word for ... uh... work place thing. Studio? Something like that. What I did figure out is that this atelier is kind of like taking art classes at the city cultural center. Five "classes" of adult artists got together and showcased their work. It was adorable. I really felt like I was judging the middle school art fair at Faith again. Some of the oeuvres were really good (aka Michel's work, and two or three other artists...out of 120). Others were pretty much duplicates of things I created in high school. That was the cute part; especially when I put it in relief with the mass of people participating in the aperitif drinks in the main entry.

One French lady came up with her husband and was talking to us about her life. She was boring but very knowledgeable about the subject. Elisabeth and I made fun of her afterwards. Oh, don't worry, it was in the nicest way possible: Frensh style! I was just glad to be able to remember some of what she said, so that I could repeat it. It helps that she mentioned five times that she was the president of some sculpture association. Fuel for the flames of French satire! Sadly, she is no longer president. It was just so demanding, you know?

After standing around for about an hour and listening to French with my ears and watching Angelika page through a book of modern art done my a guy my age, we headed back to the appartement for dinner. Ratatouille! Yum! Halfway through dinner Elisabeth got a call from her sister (Yes, she answered her phone during dinner. The French apparently don't consider this as rude? Or maybe it's just my family), and while she was talking in the kitchen Michel asked me what I think I'm going to miss the most about France.

The first thing to pop into my head, of course, was him and his philosophical discussions. Then I thought of Elisabeth and decided that I was going to miss her too. For some reason, though, I didn't feel like I could actually say that out loud. I held it back and instead mentioned some other French, like Lucie and Noury and Blanchet. Then he turned the conversation to what things I was going to miss. Fromage blanc and yoghurt.

That's what I'm going to miss. The yoghurt here is...it's a dream in a small glass jar. That's what it is. I actually acquired a spoon so that when I'm in Paris and want cheap lunch/snacks I will have something to eat yoghurt with. It's better than candy or icescream, I promise.

Oh, yeah...I'm going to Paris! Haha... since it suddenly occurs to me to actually announce it, there you are! Tomorrow is my last day in Rennes, and on Sunday morning I leave for Paris. I'm going to be pseudo alone, as a friend of mine from UNC-Greeley is there right now doing a study program. I'll be staying in a youth hostel and seeing all the things I missed when I was in Paris in January with the huge group.

I'm planning on seeing the Louvre, the Musé d'Orsay, and Versailles, along with lots of the Seine and bridges. Be sure to look for me in Colorado on Wednesday night, though! Haha, assuming I don't get stranded! Oh man, that would be so horrible...

29 May 2008

Allergies? What?

I apparently am allergic to France.

Yeah, I know. Ridiculous. I've never been allergic to anything in my entire life, and now that it's spring and raining and all green and stuff, I can't stop sneezing. I can't go to the lavanderie by the river anymore cause there's some flower/plant thing over there that makes my eyes all itchy. Not even exagerating, the last time I was down there with Jessica last week, by the time I got home I could barely keep my eyes open (they hurt so much), much less look at them in the mirror to see how red they were.

I had Christmas eyes that day...ha...ha....uh. That means they were bright red and green.
Today wasn't as bad as that, but this is annoying. I'm ready for dry Colorado. Forget the green grass and blooming flowers. I want some dead foliage and no more tiny bugs flying around.

Classes ended this past Wednesday. Today felt like Saturday, even though it was Thursday. I spent the day with Johanna, Jessica, and Sophia. I think we hit every mall in Rennes...there are three. The first was totally the ghetto mall, the second was about on par with a Mills mall, and the last was really just Super Walmart with a Printemps department store on the side. Yay for souvenir shopping!

One fantastic thing to note is that the weather people keep on telling us to expect rain, but the past two days have been sunny and bright. Hopefully this continues for about a week. I don't mind rain, or walking around in it, but I seem to really hate carrying around a jacket or umbrella which I don't need.

Today was the first day people started leaving. Mark's gone back to Indiana, and tomorrow Sophia leaves. I'm going with her to the train station to help load her suitcases on the train, and then I'm going to head back home to pack my own bags. Jessica and Sarah will be at the beach (hence another reason to hope it's sunny tomorrow) and Collin is hanging with his real parents, so I'll have no reason not to have all my packing done by Friday night. Then I can spend Saturday with Jessica running around and buying things to make my bags too heavy to carry. That's the point of going home, right? The day-before-you-leave souvenir rush? Oh brother.

I just hope everything fits. And that nothing breaks!

28 May 2008

Portrait #4: Isabelle NOURY

Isabelle NOURY, PhD
Professor of Languages
AKA coolest prof ever

This woman was by far the best French professor I have ever had.
Picture a woman of somewhere in her fifties. No one really knows how old she is, because like the classic French woman, she is in wonderful shape. She has short gray hair with undertones of black, and her eyebrows are a very dark brown, so she must have been a brunette when she was younger. Mme Noury is also Bretonne, which means that both of her parents were born in Bretagne, and her ancestors are Celts. The Bretons are very proud of their heritage.

Noury wears a lot of dark colors, but not as much black as most French. And of course she has the chic square frame brand name reading glasses. Which French person doesn't? I'm really starting to wonder if Europeans know what contacts really are...

The real reason Mme Noury is so amazing is that she scares us all to death. She knows everything about the French language, and though she doesn't speak English, she's been teaching so long that she can read student papers without knowing who wrote them, and then tell us whether the author was anglophone, hispanophone, asiatique etc. It's scary. When she explains things to us, she gets really close, like a foot away from your face. Sometimes you're in class doing work and suddenly you realise she's speaking and you look up and she's right there talking to you and you're not even the one who had asked the question!

If you ask her why something is the way that it is, she'll not only go through why that is that way, but why this other thing which is kinda similar is the same way, and then she'll go through the exceptions to all the rules that she just explained.

Every student I know is slightly terrified and completely in awe of this professor. She introduced herself on the first day of class as the Princess of CIREFE. I had her for my Written Expression class, which for the first month was in a non-CIREFE building a three minute walk away from where everyone else has/had classes. Now, no French university building is pretty. They don't care what you put on the outside of buildings, it's what goes on on the inside that counts (which is why their computer labs suck and all their students wear Louis Vuitton and Puma...hm......incongruity!). At the end of that first month, Noury decided that she didn't like having class down there. She wanted to be in the "clean and pretty" batîment E, where the rest of CIREFE was.

So Mark and Johanna's Written Expression class got moved to the building we had been in, and our class moved into the room they had been using. Princess!

Her class was also one of the hardest. She didn't grade us easy. She told us she was going to grade like a French teacher, and she graded like a French teacher. I can remember getting one short page-length essay back from her. On the top was written 13/20, and next to it was "très bien". I almost died from happiness. Remember that they don't use a point system, so the 13 I got was really like a B or something. The "très bien" next to it didn't just mean it was "very good"...it meant that I had done good work.

Noury was also one of the only teachers this semester who would remember my name outside of class and greet me on the sidewalk outside of the building. The other prof who did this was Monsieur Blanchet, another wonderful person.

I wish that I had had more time with Noury and her intimidating teaching style. She actually made us want to work in order to please her...

20 May 2008

Le weekend des châteaux

Saturday morning the program required us to wake up way too early in order to be on the bus, which left the school parking lot at 8am. I don't care who you are or what time you usually wake up in the morning, 8am is too early. People are supposed to be waking up at 8, not already being somewhere besides their bedrooms.


We all were loaded onto the bus and we sat rather calmly for about two hours before we stopped for a picnic lunch (which really just means that Andrew handed each of us 10 euro and let us go find our own food in whatever little town we were in). We had paninis and quiche. It was cheap enough that we felt good about having money left over. Like we were getting paid back some of the mountain of money that we paid to be here in the first place.


After lunch we drove some more and then we stopped at Ussé (say "oo-say"), which is the château of Sleeping Beauty. It was raining. And I mean RAINING. It wasn't like in Bretagne, where the rain is kind of nice and stops pretty quickly after beginning. Rain in the Loire Valley, on the other hand, gets a good running start and just keeps on going. Of course I had left my umbrella in my room that morning. I remember looking at it thinking, "Of course it won't rain. It's supposed to be 19°C...I'll just leave it here and that way I won't have to bring it with me everywhere."


Well, the good thing was that I didn't have to drag my umbrella all around the château. The bad thing was that I was completely soaked from the moment I stepped off of the bus until some random time about four hours later, after we had seen our second château.

Ussé was really cute. It was rather small, although I'm sure that every American says that after they visit châteaux in France and are confronted with the fact that château doesn't necessarily mean 'Versailles'. Go figure. It was decorated like it was the 20s, complete with mannequins in period costumes. These things scared the crap out of me. I mean, seriously...a smiling mannequin? That's going just a tad overboard.


The upstairs of the château contained rooms set up with the story of Sleeping Beauty. Yes, complete with mannequins dressed up as the fairy tale characters. It was cool and hilarious, especially because I'm pretty sure that the mannequin who was supposed to be the evil witch was wearing a Halloween Maleficent costume. Maleficent is the name given to the evil witch in the Disney version of the story.


The view from the courtyard was fantastic, you could see over the valley and the river, and with the rain and mist it was like we were in one of those sad moments just after the princess pricks her finger and falls asleep for a hundred years.


Just when the rain was letting up we left the château and headed to Azay le Rideau (say "ah-zay luh ree-doe"), another pretty sweet spot. The château is half in the water, and is built with an open air staircase right in the "middle". I put "middle" in parentheses because it's only the middle from a couple perspectives. The guy who built the place totally was going to have everything symetrical, but something went wrong with financing and the king hating him, so in the end it's nearly symmetrical on one side, and on the other...well it works.


One thing I loved is that the château itself was relatively small, and it had it's own tree-lined lane to lead up to it. We had fun with that. Our tour guide was cool too. I don't remember his name because I never heard it. We were standing in the gift shop when we suddenly realised that the entirety of our group had been transfered outside and was listening very intently to the French guy tell them everything about the lovely mansion.


I do, however, remember his beard. Oh man. You know those beards that all 20-something men want to be able to grow but never can? Yeah, it was totally that beard. He of course was slightly balding, and it looked like his salt-and-pepper beard had been electrocuted. It had to have been at least a foot long...


At Azay I frolicked across a field of daisies with Jessica and Johanna. Not even joking. It was pretty much the best thing ever.

That night we ate dinner and stayed in Tours. Most everyone else ended up partying the night away at bars and clubs...I decided to go "home" with my friends after one drink and go to bed. In the morning over half the bus was hung over and a couple people even were hurling, apparently. Fan-tastic. Gotta love those smart ones.


On our way to the first château of the day the driver got lost for an hour. He went the wrong direction, and stopped twice in front of cafés to ask for directions. I didn't really mind this since I was half asleep, but the people who were wishing they could tumble outside and hurl.

We finally got to the château, Chenonceau. It's honestly one of the most beautiful châteaux ever. It's often called "Le Château des Dames" (Castle of Women) because of the women who influenced its design... just plain for living there. Among the famous gardens are the gardens of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Pointiers. It's the most visited castle in France.

After Chenonceau we headed to Amboise, a much smaller but rather cute castle. Those of you fairy tale lovers might recognise the grounds as the ones which were filmed in the movie Ever After. At least, Johanna and Jessica and Sophia and I are all convinced that they are the same. Besides, Amboise was the living place of Leonardo da Vinci for a chunk of his life, so why not film it there? We even saw his house on the neighboring hill!

The visit at Amboise was rather short, even though the guide was really nice; it's just a very small château. Afterwards we gathered up for a group picture and Andrew told us that since the driver had gotten lost that morning we has kinda earned twenty five minutes of wandering on our own. I went up to the "gardens" with Jessica and Sarah (quote because the garden totally turned out to be bushes and gravel...haha oh you Frenchies), where we found Hugo, one of the French moniteurs. We walked down with him and while everyone was hanging out in the area in between the souvenir shop and the bathroom Hugo and I had a great French conversation about why you would or would not want to fry an egg on your head.

Hugo speaks really fantastic English, so he was familiar with frying an egg on the sidewalk when it is really hot outside. But he's also French, so the joke part of me telling Sarah to buy eggs and fry them on her hair (which was really hot) kinda missed him. It was a lot like an hour earlier, when Jessica and I were talking to Nicolas, another French moniteur, and he corrected her on a mistake she made of pronounciation. She thanked him sarcastically and he was halted. "But why are you thanking me?" he asked. We laughed.

The French like to take things seriously, apparently. Even funny stories about myself and my friends don't flow as well in French as they do in English. Sad.

We got home late Sunday night, Staci ended up driving us home, which was just lovely of her to do. Sophia and Jessica and I had actually just been trying to figure out which of us was going to go ask for the ride when Staci got on the bus speaker system and offered the Saint Grégoire girls a ride home. She lives in Betton, a suburb even further north of Rennes, so it was no problem for her. When I got home my parents had actually only been there for about five minutes. Apparently when I'm out of the house for the weekend they go to friends' houses to hang out.

And then I started studying for my finals...haha

15 May 2008

Des Invités: Guests

Yesterday I got home in the early evening, after having wandered around with Sophia for a little bit. It was Wednesday, so i was expecting Elisabeth and Michel to both be out. Usually Elisabeth is volunteering at the hospital library, and Michel is out doing errands or something like that. But this time Michel was out on the terrace smoothing out a fresh patch of concrete, and three minutes after I got home Elisabeth walked in the door with a bag full of groceries.

I grabbed some water and my homework and sat in the living room to do homework, half waiting to see if there was a conversation opportunity and half waiting...for food! After a few minutes Michel asked when "they" were coming. 6:30pm. I asked who "they" were, and all Elisabeth said was, "Some friends." O...k...

At 6:32pm the doorbell rang. I was in my room writing letters; Elisabeth had half kicked me out of the living room so that she could set out all the things for the aperitif. I had no idea who these people were or even how long they were going to stay, so I adjusted my ponytail, put on my mocassins, and headed out to the salon where all the 'adults' were. I really did feel like the child walking in on the adults getting ready for dinner. Our guests were Auguste and Louise (I actually can't for the life of me remember the woman's name, so for now she's Louise, until I can remember it). They were host parents with CIEE for 20 years. They also hold the record for having the most students hosted in their home: 28.

The Massons had talked about them before, and when I found out who they were I relaxed a lot. This meant that they would know how to actually include me in the conversation! We've had other guests over before, sure, and they were all super nice, but since they were just plain French they just kinda left me off to the side, letting me sit there and wonder if I should be there or not. But Auguste and Louise directly asked me questions about my stay here, and talked about things that they found out interested me.

Auguste was really cute, he reminded me of a leprechaun because he was really short, but in really good shape for 70 years old. He had one of those beards that's almost an Amish beard but it was trimmed very short in a cute little white circle around his face. He also had the roundish glasses and kind of figety ways of a little Irish imp, and I swear his French had a celtic lilt to it every once in a while.

His wife was the same size as him, almost exactly. I think her head came up to about the middle of my upper arm. She was really sweet and reminded me of a cross between my grandma Bert and Terri Opeka, if you know who they are. She had short brown hair and kept on clasping her hands and complimenting Elisabeth on the appartement. Elisabeth replied to everything Louise said in the most proper French way possible: "Oh, thank you, I suppose we do what we can..."

The French don't believe in accepting compliments, even if what you say is perfectly true and not a way to flattery, they always say something like "Well, yes, if you say so" so that they don't seem to be prideful. They definitely don't give compliments by the handful like we do. You don't get a "oh you look so cute today!" from the French. Nope. You know if you look good if when you get on the métro the people there give you the up-down. If they just glance at you, you're ok. If they give you the up-down and then look away, you've got it down. If, on the other hand, they look at you and continue to just stare at you the entire way, you are probably very obviously american that day.

During our aperitif, which I quickly figured out was actually our entire dinner, not just the drinks that go beforehand, I tried to practice listening to two conversations at once. At first the women were talking about (go figure) having children and the men were talking about painting. I guess they were each talking about what interests them the most. My strategy didn't work very well. I can still only focus on one thing at a time. I discovered this when I had been looking at Auguste but listening to Louise and Auguste asked me a question. Totally failed. But it's ok.

There were two interesting conversational occurences during dinner. The first was when Auguste tried to ask me if I felt prepared for France's something by the something of the something. Please, if anyone understands this question, let me know. Haha...What happened is that he asked a question beginning with Hilary Clinton and Obama. Then he talked about Evangelism and science in schools, and then about culture. Then he wanted to know if I had been prepared for France. Or something in France? I have no idea, and I told him that I had no idea what the question really was. He tried to explain it again, but it was hopeless. Each time I tried to answer he said that it wasn't that which he was talking about. "Uh...ok!"

At the end of that conversation I got to experience my very first really super awkward French pause. We sat there, kind of smiling uncomfortably at one another, thinking, "Well, great, the American doesn't get it...now what?" Luckily Louise jumped into a new subject within a couple of seconds and everyone was off again. The French are very good at switching subjects, but usually we actually complain about it because it means that we can't follow part of the discussion, form a retort or comment in our heads, and use it later. By the time we have something brilliant to say about global warming, they're talking about coffee. The real mystery is how they actually get from one topic to another. No one really knows....

The second funny thing was actually really hilarious. It shows perfectly how the French think. Auguste asked me what I wanted to do after my studies at CU. "I'm not positive it'll work out, but I would love to be a children's book writer," I said. He smiled and nodded, and so did Michel and Louise. Elisabeth, on the other hand, turned to me and exclaimed, "But you told me that you're studying to be a journalist!" I grinned a little, I believe, as I contradicted her.

"No...I said I'm studying journalism. But I want to write fairy tales for kids."
"Then why are you studying journalism?" Oh the age-old question. I braced myself in my mind as I began to explain what I've told her three times before. It's also something that people find difficult to understand in English, much less French.
"Well...one of my...biggest faults (of course here I completely forgot the word for 'weakness') is that I tend to be shy and non-assertive and I never know what questions to ask of people."
"But you're not shy!"
"It's taked work. I decided that to make the fault go away I needed to study journalism to teach me how to ask questions. Does that...make sense?"

Everyone looked at me and smiled. Elisabeth furrowed her brow and told me that she didn't understand and that it was strange. I agreed. Then Auguste did the switch and started talking about a writer's conference that had been at St. Malo a weekend or so ago. He wished that he had known that I liked kid's stories sooner, otherwise he would have tried to get me to go. I found this interesting simply for the fact that last night was the first time I had ever met him. So this means that Elisabeth and Michel talk about me to them, of course, that makes sense.

The problem that Elisabeth had is a problem of many French for the one reason that the French don't study one thing but go and do another. If you study journalism, you become a reporter. If you study english, you teach english. You don't have any way around it. So in her world, as permeated by Americans as it may be, it's not possible for me to study journalism but to try to enter a career as a story teller. It just doesn't work. I still want to write it out for her, to try to get her to understand what's happening. Part of me feels like if they could just understand this one thing, everything would be perfect. Not necessarily true, but a nice thought nonetheless.

Oh, and I accidentally told Elisabeth that I hate all the other people in my program. No, it's not true. I don't hate anybody. Sure, there are people I don't hang out with, but that's generally a time/schedule issue, not likes and dislikes. We were talking about immersion and how the students who succeed with families with children are the students whose level of French is higher than others' levels. Someone asked me a question about whether it's easy to spot the Americans in France or not. "Of course," I answered, "In fact, when me and my friends see them, we actually try to avoid them!"

Auguste smiled and said "Well, like that you become more French!"
Elisabeth shook her head: "No, she just wants to stay in her own american group!"

I didn't have time to register what she had said until about a minute later, and by then the subject had changed and it was too late to correct her. We had been talking about tourists and high school students, and she took me to mean that I stayed away from the other kids in my program! Immediately afterwards I felt like sort of an idiot for letting that slip by unchallenged, but you can't catch them all, I guess. Haha...

I was so tired last night after doing so much French that I actually went to sleep before midnight. This was good because I had a test at 8am this morning in my writing class. Everything went very well except, of course, for the first question, in which I informed my teacher that the word for "ear" is masculin. Yeah, it's definitely feminin. Woops. At least my fairy tale turned out well...that was the essay portion. I rocked it.

love.

14 May 2008

13 mai: la Fête!!!

Today was Tuesday, and tonight we had a little fête with CIEE. It was (most of) the students and their families. Michel and Elisabeth went for I believe a grand total of about 15 minutes. I was really confused. One minute I was running in the door with them to get out of the rain, the next I was finding my friends and trying to figure out the etiquette for introducing (do you leave your parents where they are? Do you introduce your friends right away? Do you stay with them? I don’t know!!!!), and the next they were just gone. Vanished. Michel did have his atelier artist workshop thing tonight, but it doesn’t start until 20h30, and the aperitif started at 19h00!! We had even gotten there early but stayed in the car for 15 minutes while they waited to see if the rain would let up.

I think this was the French in them. I was totally all about just running for it. But no, we had to wait. Haha…I found it pretty amusing.
[sidenote written later: I found out that he had to be early cause he and his painter peeps are getting ready for a 120-person show really soon. He asked me why the other Saint Grégoire families hadn't shown up. When he asked me, I had no idea. I found out today that Sophia's family "forgot" that it was on Tuesday night, and that Jessica's family were "too tired" to go)

Jess and Johanna and I wore our sundresses to the party. Most everyone else was in jeans. We didn’t care, though. Got a great “what are you wearing?” French look of wonder from Michel, though. That was fun.

Staci and Andrew had asked us to write a couple lines about what we think of our families. I wrote mine last night and emailed it to Staci, and everyone’s stuff was read out loud to the group (anonymously, of course, and they had the native French speakers read them, so besides everybody’s horrible grammar they sounded amazing!). It was a very strange feeling to hear something I’d written get applause, and it was even stranger to see Staci and Andrew shaking their heads (you know, the good shake, the ‘wow’ head shake) and saying to one another that it had been really good.

We hung out for a while, talked to Mark’s and Collin’s parents, and I encouraged Collin’s host brother to keep messing around. He was dodging around and tapping people’s shoulders, then hiding. I joined in the game when he was around our group. I think Collin wanted to kill me. Haha. He didn’t want kids in his French family. I still wish I had gotten some, but oh well. It turned out well.

Mark’s mom invited us officially to her home on French Mother’s day. Mark’s making steak and stuff, and he had already asked us to come over and to make dessert. I didn’t know that it was Mother’s Day here, though, and all of a sudden I’m wondering if I should be going or not. I mean, I know that if I stay here Elisabeth probably still won’t let me do anything to help her. It’s like they’re afraid of us Americanizing their clean floors, seriously, I don’t get it. I actually MISS doing my own laundry!!! What is up with that?

So I’ll have to watch Elisabeth's reaction when I say I’ve been invited somewhere on a Sunday. I hope it’s ok. It’s not like she’s my real mother, but she is kinda…there… all the time. Then again, something I just thought of, I'm totally going to be home for dinner, the thing is simply for lunch. Haha I guess we all really suck at this whole French etiquette thing. Even Jessica is wondering if she should be staying at home for lunch, and her host parents don't even really include her in things! Well, I mean, they do, but they don't at the same time.

It's so complicated. One minute she feels really included and like she can actually talk and not be afraid, and the next she feels like the last person in the world they want in their home is her.

La Forêt Domaniale de Rennes

On Monday (the 12th) we went to a French forest. I think I took a total of three pictures, it was really sort of a disappointment. Let me explain.

Jess and I left St. Gregoire at 11h03 in order to get to centre ville buy picnic food, and catch the 12h15 line 50 bus up to the forest (since it was a jour férié each bus line only ran once an hour). We stood in the marché for about half an hour, half thinking that Collin was going to come and choose food with us. Nope. We got meat and cheese, two water bottles, and a green apple. Collin met us at the bus stop, we hopped on, and about twenty minutes later Mark got on when we reached his house. Lucky him, being the closest to the forest.

At Juteauderies we jumped off and walked straight down the road for sevenish minutes before hitting the forest. It was very beautiful. It was great to see real trees, not the poor mutilated things that we’re used to all over Rennes. The French believe that flowering trees are so much more beautiful when you cut all of the branches so they all look stubby and swollen. During the winter they look like poor handicapped plants; though in the spring and summer the blossoms do look pretty cool all so close together…

The forest was paved. Not even exaggerating. Maybe I should have taken more pictures of it just for that reason. We walked in on the blacktop and thought, “Ok, sure, it’s just like this cause it’s the entrance.” Wrong! It’s like that cause the French are afraid to actually be out in the wild. Not that walking trails are “the wild”, but seriously, people. Seriously? Sidewalks in a forest?
The four of us walked for a while before sitting down on a concrete water aquaduct (? Yeah, I don’t really know…but it did sound like there was water flowing through it) and ate our lunch. Bugs bit me, and this one huge flying beetle which looked like a mini scarab kept on flying past my and Jessica’s faces. Mark beat it away with the plastic tray from the lunch meat. I still have bug bites all over, and not just from moustiches. I have tiny little bites on the top of my left hand, too, and I’m really curious as to what got me there.

We left the forest around 3 and ended up at the stop about 45 minutes before the next bus was going to pull through, so we just started walking. We walked about two or three stops down, checking each time to see how long we had to wait for the bus. We finally halted when we had about 15 more minutes to wait. It was hot. I was in jean shorts and a tshirt, and it was HOT. Bleah. It doesn’t help at all that Bretagne is getting just a tidge more humid as the weather gets warmer. I think part of it has to do with how much it rains.

But it was hot, and while we were sitting there in the 34*C spring sun, Mark remembered that there is a McDonalds at the stop right before his house. Yes, dear friends, yes we went to Macdo’s. But only for the icecream! I had a McFlurry with kit kat turds in it. They were so good. Sorry about the turds part. They were just really tiny balls.

Of coursem since we stopped and hung out, and left the shrine of American consumerism just a few minutes too late, Jess and Collin and I missed the next bus down to centre ville. We walked to another line, got there half an hour before the next bus, and decided once again to just walk the road until we had less than 20 minutes to wait.

Once in centre ville Jess and I did this again one time since we had missed our bus by twenty minutes. Buses only running once an hour is kind of a huge pain in the butt. I did get a rather nice even burn on my arms, though. Not too bad, just enough to have people come up to me just so that they can push their fingers into my skin and watch it leave white marks. I find immense joy in telling them that my skin always does that. It’s just a bit more pink than it usually is.
I got home around 6 and the night pretty much progressed as Sunday did.

Funny how it’s suddenly become so easy to just fall into my France routine. When people ask me questions in French, I like to think that I answer them. Maybe I don’t. Maybe that’s why conversations that I begin are so awkward. They’re still reveling in the fact that I tried to introduce a subject.

12 mai

Today was yet another French holiday: Pentecost!! Honestly, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when I actually have to go to an entire semester of classes without having at least one or two four day weekends. Of course, not having classes on Fridays really is the way to go. If you can ever not have classes on a Friday, or maybe even a Monday, go for it.

Yesterday morning Jess and I went for a two hour bike ride to Betton, a suburb to the north. There’s a good-sized marché there every weekend and we wanted to look around for a little bit. Luckily we didn’t take any money along, otherwise I would have really been tempted to buy a watch and a pair of jasmine pants. The style is getting really popular here, and though it hurts my insides to want something that everyone else has, you have to admit that it would be super cool to have a pair of Jasmine pants with sequins embroidered into the belt. Maybe it will be a project for when I get home this summer and have nothing to do…

After the marché and the end of our ride Sophia pulled herself away from her homework and came to my house for lunch, which was the rest of the fruit salad from the night before, the yoghurt that the boys had left in my fridge, and vanilla wafers and a little bit of chocolate. Should I use this moment to say that I really miss vegetables? I eat so many potatoes and so much bread…I think I’m going to be a temporary vegetarian when I get home, just so I can cleanse my body of all the starch and carbs and other junk I’ve been putting in my body this semester. It’s not that the food is unhealthy; it’s actually fresher than most everything that we eat in the states. But when half your meal is potato and the other half is meat and bread and salted butter, you start to wonder why one of the first foods you learned in French was “green beans”.

When lunch was done we walked to Jessica’s house, I took the bike, and we watched Mary Poppins in French. The voices, we were rather surprised to notice, were done very well. We’re used to French dubbing picking the worst, most annoying voices to perform. It seems that in the years of Mary Poppins the standards were much higher. I rode home after that, didn’t get a huge hello from my returned parents, and took a shower. Afterwards I went out on the terrace and was reading. I tried to start a conversation with Elisabeth, but she didn’t really jump on the opportunity. I’m so confused. So they think that I don’t talk enough…but when I start a conversation, they don’t…respond in full. Ok. Whatever. They really expect me to start sharing my heart and dreams and frustrations with them? Elisabeth still doesn’t seem to understand that I’m not going to be a journalist, even though I’m sure I’ve explained about 10 times that I hate reporting. Then again, this really is a French thing. The French do NOT study one thing and go and do another. This is one thing I’ve discovered while here. It’s like my grandmother thinking that I’m studying to be the pretty face that reads a teleprompter…uh…no way. I’d rather encourage children to be fairies and pirates, thanks very much.

11 May 2008

Fougères

On Saturday we went to Fougères to see the castle there. It took about an hour to get there by bus, though we noticed that it would have taken about 25 minutes if we had had our own car. The ride there was gorgeous! Everything is green now, since the weather has been going absolutely insane for the past few weeks. It will be rainy and freezing one day, and then sunny and in the 80°s the next. The grass doesn't know what to do with itself besides grow...a lot.

Once in Fougères the four of us (Me, Jess, Mark, and Collin) jumped out of the bus, which had been ridiculously warm, and headed to a boulangerie for some nourishment. The boys got their sandwiches while Jessica and I sat on the side of a fountain and broke into her bread and camembert (man I'm going to miss that cheese). A little girl was running all over the plaza waving a toy fan thing in the air. I can't think of the name of it right now, of course it's probably just "fan thing", but it's one of those spinny things that you swish back and forth to get the colored fan moving. She had like six mini fans on a big red plastic stick, and spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out which way to run in order to get the best wind.

The castle at Fougères is pretty cool. It was built in 1166. It's remarkably intact, and shows off the first drawbridge ever...at least, it still has the tower that had the bridge leading into it. The bridge itself hasn't been there for a while, though you can see the new stones which were laid to fill the hole. We got a 3 euro half hour tour of the insides. It was, of course, in French. I understood a good chunk of it, but the guy was just so excited and was talking so phenomenally fast...it was difficult. Maybe if I were taking architecture with Mark and Jessica and had already heard all the terms that he was talking about, maybe then I would have been able to pay better attention. But no. It wasn't meant to be.

We got back into Rennes around 17h30 and headed up to St. Grégoire (yes all of us) and met Sophia at E.Leclerc to buy stuff to make dinner. Leclerc is huge, about the size of Super-Walmart, and sells about the same things. We were there for an hour, and finally came out with the makings for chicken, pasta and cream sauce, and fruit salad. Haha sometimes it's just ridiculous, how long it takes us to do things...

We got all the way up to Jessica's house and discovered that it wasn't, after all, as empty as it was supposed to be. Her host sister Lucie and Lucie's bf Gerard were there, making their own dinner. Luckily, my host parents were gone as well, leaving my apparte completely open for a quiet dinner party. Of course, we listened to music and were probably talking much louder than normal French people would talk while we were eating dinner on the terrace, but hey. We totally deserve to be able to actually make our own dinner and clean up after ourselves every once in a while.

The boys made the chicken and cream sauce, while the girls occupied themselves with the fruit salad and setting the table and then standing around and wondering why there wasn't more to do. It was a really good dinner born out of me showing Mark where the spices were and him exclaiming "Oh, real spices! Real un-French spices! Curry!" and Collin taking charge of the sauce. It had ananas in it--pineapple. Yummy.

After the boys left to walk down to the bus stop at almost midnight, Sophia and Jess and I watched the Incredibles on the laptop in the living room. It was brilliant. I love that movie.

Portrait#3: Monsieur LAVANANT

M LAVANANT
Professor

Classic French male (in most ways). One of the younger teachers, Lavanant is tall, dark haired, and before vacation I ran into him smoking with some other teachers on the stairway on the outside of the building. I don’t think there has been a day that he hasn’t worn black. Like Mme C, he’s a good Frenchman and re-wears his clothing multiple times a week. And like a good Rennais, which I’m not really sure he is or not, he wears black leather hippie shoes. There isn’t much shape to them except for oval, and they have red shoelaces.

When Lavanant walks to and from the white board, he kind of stalks to it, approaching it carefully. His class is Oral Comprehension, and is relatively difficult, if only because we listen to songs and watch videos in French with the aim of perfectly understanding everything which is said. Think of it this way: The normal anglophone doesn’t even understand everything in English songs, much less songs sung in their second language.

What’s even better is he makes fun of us. Rather, he’s simply a sarcastic Frenchman who makes laughs at us when we say stupid things. The other day he was complaining about loud children in Parc Thabor. He leaned against the wall in between two of the large windows in the classroom, with his arms crossed. “I mean, you go to the park, a beautiful park, and expect to be relaxed; but then the children come…oh and they yell and yell and yell…”

“But they’re children…”
“Oh bof…” This translates roughly as “Well, sure, yeah, whatever” and it was hilarious to see the reaction of the brasilienne who had responded to him. He even tells us to be sarcastic with children. “They need to learn to be tougher.”

I just want to say that in the week since I first wrote this, there has been a single day when Lavanant wore something beside black. It was apparently khaki and white linen day on Thursday. Jessica and I almost died of shock.

Portrait #2: Monsieur DELEBEQUE

M DELEBEQUE
Professor

M D is my Civilisation teacher. My other friends, who are in classes of levels above mine, have Civi (say “see-vee”) classes which talk about French politics and social security. My first class was a degustation of Breton specialties (our prof brought Breton cookies, crêpes, and cider to class and we “deguster”d them. That was franglais for 'we “taste”d' them). We talked about them and then ate them.

M D has four kids, and I think he’s in his forties…maybe older, or younger. I don’t even know. Everyone dresses the same here, and a greater percentage of people are actually in good shape, and these things combined make it very hard to tell what ages people actually are. Delebeque wears jeans that, as Abby described them, are generally only worn by gay men. But that’s how it is all over France. Men wear the weirdest pants.

He’s short and small, but in good shape it looks like. Balding as well, so he shaves his head, or at least, keeps his hair so that it’s really really really short. His head is very round. He wears only long sleeve shirts and jeans, which isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes I look at what he’s wearing and wonder how he decided to like it.

The class itself is very easy. He answers questions, actually, he spends a lot of time trying to get us to ask questions. There isn’t very much which is confusing when it comes to French Social Security. Wait, no. That’s a total lie. It can be very confusing. But at least we know that when it comes to the final test, we’re not going to have to have everything tiny memorized. He doesn’t quiz us on things that are hard to remember. Maybe that’s why we also don’t ask very many questions…when one of the questions on your test was “Name a French wine” you kind of lose all fear of failing the class.

I don't have much else to say about Delebeque, since I very rarely have anything to complain about when it's Monday morning at 10h30 and I'm looking at two hours of him having us discuss French Social Security and underemployment and food.

Portrait #1: Madame CIESLARCZYK

Mme Françoise CIESLARCZYK, PhD
Professor

Picture a woman of an age somewhere between 50 and 60. She’s about 5’7”, yet somehow rather stout. Her family is Slavic, I think. I mean, obviously, look at her last name. She has a long, wide nose and wide, thin eyes, though sometimes it’s difficult to tell because she wears classy French glasses which just barely manage to magnify her eyes, but not quite. I think she only has three outfits in her entire closet, because, like a good French woman, she re-wears everything during the week, and thinking about it now I can only see one outfit in my mind. It’s a brown pinstripe A-line skirt with a matching jacket. The fabric is linen, from what I can see. I could very well be wrong. Her hair is short and auburn and highlighted liberally with blond and brown.

Mme C is my étude de la langue teacher (Language Studies). I see her three times a week generally without fail, unless God smiles upon me and my classmates and we don’t have class either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Her style of teaching is thus: Give students a piece of paper loosely explaining the idea of the day. Don’t explain the paper. Order students to orally create examples of what is on the paper. Stand in exasperation when the Asians, Brazilians, and Americans just sit and stare at you. Give students another piece of paper containing exercises related to the first piece of paper. Order students to complete it. While everyone is working, be sure to stand just behind their shoulders while rustling your papers and tsking whenever they make a mistake. Don’t answer questions. If a student does ask a question, pretend to answer while walking away, then say that you’ll come back. Don’t come back.

I’m sure that Mme C is nice outside of the class. Goodness knows that she tries to make jokes and laughs at things that French people must understand. We smile out of politeness and laugh every once in a while for fun. My favorite phrase of hers is, “We won’t talk about this now because it’s something for students of Avancé.” I just don’t understand how someone who can’t teach has lasted so long at CIREFE. Shouldn’t you be able to teach if you’re going to be a professor of foreign students in a university? I don’t know, maybe that’s just me…
I can remember spending a good amount of time complaining about Mme C with all my American friends in the first week at classes. Now, I just let things go. I can’t really change whether she actually answers questions or not, and maybe it truly is that we’re asking dumb questions.

“Madame, I don’t understand this thing.”
“But we just talked about it.”
“Yes, I know, but I think I missed something. Why can’t I say this like this?”
“We just talked about it. Haven’t you learned this sort of thing before?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember…”
“Ok. I’ll come back.”

This is a typical ‘question conversation’ between Mme C and Julia. Julia and Abby and I are always sitting next to one another near the windows of the classroom. Escape dreams? Definitely. Unfortunately, we are on the fourth level of the building, making survival that much less achievable. Some people count down days to seeing friends and family...I count down how many more classes of hers I have to sit through.

09 May 2008

Homeness!

It occured to me last night that I'm going to be back in Colorado soon. It was a very strange feeling. I was looking at my flight information, and thinking to myself, "Ok, I have the flight, I have the hostel in Paris booked. I hope it's 24 hour check-in/out...wait, how am I going to get my suitcases everywhere? Those things are huge! I need to throw out some shoes. And clothes. What if my bags get stuck on one side of the metro, and I'm on the other? I need to figure that out..."

The conversation with myself continued for a while, until I went to bed and had dreams about running around the Paris metro with suitcases as big as sumo wrestlers. I think it was my mind's feeble attempt at a nightmare. Is that how you spell "feeble"? I tried it with "ea" and "ie" and it looked even more strange. English is so hard now! Haha but that's ok! I guess it means that I'm loosing my Americanness.

Tomorrow we're going to Fougères. The largest castle in France is there, and it's supposed to be really cool. Afterwards we're making dinner at Jessica's house, I'm pretty sure. Her parents and mine are both going to be out of town, so why not have a little get-together, sit around, and practice English?

Yesterday we were in Vannes. It rained the entire time and was really cold. I don't recommend walking around in the rain. I do, however, recommend Le Petit Grand Crêperie near the cathedrale. We were served the best galettes and crêpes we've had so far in Bretagne. Plus the menu came with cidre brut, and that just makes every meal perfect. We got home early, I had some fun explaining to mes parents why I was home at such a good hour (that's totally a Frenchism, sorry) and then I took a hot shower and put on my wool socks.

So in the end it was a good day.

Today I tried to make guacamole at Jessica's house. It failed for a couple reasons. One, the avacadoes were still not quite ripe. Two, the French don't believe in jalepenos. So we had to use the guacamole spice mix, which is totally boring. We almost got bested by the food processor, but in the end I prevailed (always be sure to securely fasten all lids and apparataie).

Love you all!

07 May 2008

J'ai rêvé

"I dreamed"....

No, really, I did. It was a couple nights ago. And then I woke up in the middle of the night and the first thought that popped into my head was: "Où sont les baleines?"
"Where are the whales?"

At least it was in French, right? Last night I had a dream that Mark and I were trecking through a forest singing pirate songs and trying to find Jessica. This makes perfect sense because in London Mark and I walked through Hyde Park speaking pirate (oh, yes, it's so totally possible) and because we were talking yesterday about going up to the forest in north-east rennes and seeing if we can hike in it. And also we just love Jessica. She's so cool.

Her parents were here over our break and while Jess was talking with her mum she happened to mention how she missed one of her school hoodies and how it's strange to never get any vitamines here. So what did she receive in the mail today? A nice little box full of sweatshirt and vitamines and a postcard with a photo of her favorite mountain in Washington. It was one of those moments when on the outside you're like, "Aw, that's so sweet, thanks mom!" and you're also thinking on the inside,"How in the world will I fit this bottle in my luggage if I don't use all the pills? It's 20°C outside! I don't need this! Where will I put it?"

Last night we went to the fest noz. It was super cool. I tried to take pictures but the lighting was horrible, so they didn't come out very well. I'll try to pool pictures with Johanna and Jessica to see if something visible can be worked out. Of course, you won't be seeing these pictures for at least a month, I'm guessing, haha.

Breton dancing is really easy. You know how there's country line dancing? This is celtique circle dancing. It was super easy, especially at first. You either hold arms or pinkies, although generally pinkies (which the French call "petit doigt"- "little finger") and then someone starts dancing and you desperately try to lift your feet up and down in time to theirs. This is the moment in your sad little university life when you realise that you are the only person left in the world who can count to 4 in French.

I can't even begin to describe, without tons of handmotions, what it was to watch a giant circle of about 100 people try to spin eachother, walk around, and go in and out without losing people in the fray. Oh, and people were lost. There was one part of a dance where the girls walked towards the center of the circle and then back in 8 counts, and then the boys walked out and back, but on reentering the circle they took up the next girl down, making sure that everyone switched partners every time. The biggest problem with this is that some people switched too far, or not far enough, and every once in a while someone would be left standing slightly out of the circle from people, watching the couples on either side of them twirling.

The best part about the party was that there was no ventilation in the room. None. There were easily over a hundred people either standing or dancing and spinning and running all over the room. You could smell them, each and every one of them. It was even more amazing when I went outside to cool down a little, and then went back inside to dance again. It was like walking into a sauna full of hockey and football gear. Not the athletes, just the gear. Stinky. And then when you were dancing when you had to hold people's hands, you had to hold even tighter because everyone was whiping their sweaty faces with their palms. Everyone's faces were glistening in the dim light, hair was falling out of pony tails, guys had lines of sweat running down their spines...

And then there were people like Mark, who had to be tricked/dragged to the dance. He danced twice: once the first time Sophia came out, and the second time when a French girl came up to shake his hand, and Mark, forgetting that the French don't do that, grasped it. She pulled him up and dragged him to the circle. The event left us girls dumbfounded by the wall. We were all on break, and had been trying to convince Mark to come with us. And to think, all it took was a hippie Bretonne French girl! Oh, the look on his face. Not happy, haha...not happy at all!

05 May 2008

Midnight walks on the street

On Saturday I went to see Be Kind, Rewind with Jessica and Collin, and afterwards we met up with Mark and went to a restaurant for pizza and cidre. We finished dinner late and hung out at Place Hoche for a while (I was sad cause a lot of times it's full of middle school kids doing techtonique and I really want to record that but alack, alas, la place was empty). A little bit before 12H25 we headed down to the bus stop, so we could catch the last bus home.

Collin went home on the metro, and Mark's bus came a few minutes later, so it was just me and Jess for the few minutes before 12h37. At 12h39 I looked at my phone. We're used to the bus being late, so we just shrugged and waited some more. At 12h43 we looked at one another and walked over to the sign post, to see if somehow we had mistaken a time or day.

"THE LINE 18 WILL NOT SERVE THIS STOP ON FRIDAY THE 2 MAY AND SATURDAY THE 3 MAY (ps mwa hahahahahahaha)"

I started laughing. Jessica read the sign and started laughing too.
So this is how I know that it takes an hour on foot to get from centre ville to my apparte.

The fun part was picking flowers of the side of the road. They are now in my bathroom, in my water glass which I never use. Very pretty.

The hilarious part happened when I could literally almost see my building hiding in the near-darkness (the streets are really well lit, don't worry, and it was fun even, though exhausting). We walked across the parking lot of the mini commercial center La Forge, and were heading down an incline to the sidewalk when someone started calling to us. 'Oh great,' I thought.

We had seen two French dudes, probably *slightly* tipsy, pretending to beat one another up in front of the café. They hadn't noticed us walk silently by, and we had ignored them. But now one of them was jogging after us, asking why we hadn't greeted them.

"It's only polite, come on, really, what, are you mean or rude or something? It's easy enough to say, just say bonsoir, that's it, it's easy..."

I was an idiot and said bonsoir. Then we kept walking.

"Oh, you're not French?" Oh no.... "You're not French? What are you? English?"

'No...american. What do you want?'

"Ooh, touchy americans. Just let me talk to you..." and then he yelled his friend over: "Hey! Pierre! Americans! They say they live here!" His friend started coming over.

'We're going home, go away,' Jess said

"Home? You're not at home! You're not French!" I let out a short laugh, and he grinned "See? I'm funny! You laughed!"

'Oh I laughed,' I said, 'But only to be nice. Leave us alone.' We walked away, and he stayed where he was. And then he started yelling at us again. (all caps means it was in english)

"Yeah?!? Well, F"&ç YOU!! You're a pair of dirty whores! Whores! Whores and sluts! F@(è whores! And also BE-OTCHES!! YOU ARE BE-OTCHES!!!"

Jessica and I tried not to laugh too hard as we escaped around the corner and made sure that he wasn't following us any further. There's just something that a French accent does to cursing...haha oh man.

Ok. Enough of the blagueing...I mean joking. I realise that the situation could have potentially been very dangereux, and I also realise that maybe next time I'll just let Jessica tell people to go away and I'll stay silent so I don't provoke anything. I still felt perfectly safe the entire time. But now it's a story to tell.

Which reminds me... I think the next time I'm gonna see if I can record some of my vacances stories with my webcam, put them on my jump drive, and upload them to the internet as video blogs. Of course this will take time and effort and a quiet house...hmmm...so we'll see what happens.

je vous aime

A worm died in that apple

I'm not going to spend very long on this because I told myself that I'm not going to spend a long time in front of the computer tonight. The past couple of days I've stayed up at least until one talking to people. Talking is great, but now I'm tired! Plus, tomorrow there is a Fest Noz on campus, and I kinda need to be awake for it.

"Fest noz" in Breton means "night party". It's super traditional for the Bretons. What you do is get everyone in the entire village together under one roof (or just in any area, I guess). A lot of times the best opportunity for this was during a house raising. The reason that was the best opportunity was because the goal of the party was to get everyone to dance the ground flat. They didn't have any bulldozers or fancy stuff to pack the earth down, so the villagers would pull on their huge wooden shoes, designate the band members, and dance the night away.

Our fest noz is tomorrow night from 20h00 to 12h00, which means that when it's over we're going to have to take the 2 line home, and then walk the last twenty minutes home. Well, for me it's 20 minutes. For Jessica and Sophia it'll be at least 35, if not a couple more. But there are a ton of people going, and Jess and Johanna and I are all dressing up (just watch for once the French won't dress up and they'll all be in jeans, haha). So yeah. Cultural experience #452!

Today Johanna found the remnants of a worm hole in her apple. I had just thrown mine out (cause I was done) and as I looked at her apple I felt this inexplicable joy overflow my stomach. My apple did not have wormy residue. It was just a normal, boring reddish thingie. No surprises except for the bruise on the side that felt like a sponge.

I used the apple occurence at dinner tonight to open a conversation about buying naturel foods in their seasons and how finding tiny beasts in fruit proves that it was good for you. Haha...apparently I was shocked by it, and only because I'm American and expect my fruit to be perfect. I tried to explain that I like perfect fruit as in, without bruises. French people don't get that. They were positive that I was still talking about finding the traces of living things in my fruits and veggies. What's funny is that a few seconds afterwards I put a forkfull of salad in my mouth and I could have sworn that I ate dirt along with it.

The rest of the dinner went wonderfully. There was none of the tension that I half expected to experience since everything that happened yesterday. The conversation didn't feel forced at all. Of course, that could be because I spent the better portion of today telling myself that I was going to talk a lot at dinner and tell stories. It felt like I was syking myself up to run 5 miles before breakfast. But no matter. I'm going to turn things around and not care even more.

I wonder how many times I'm going to have to do this? Haha...

04 May 2008

Onomatopeia

I am angry with myself.
That's the new thing that I learned today.
While we were sitting at lunch Elisabeth suddenly couldn't take it any more: she took a breath and asked me for the second time this semester why I don't talk very much. I looked at her carefully. She was smiling, and had real concern behind her eyes. I took a deep breath.

"Do you feel like your French is getting any better?" was the first question. Uh...no, actually, I don't. I feel like a got a little bit better when I first got here, but then things just kinda went stagnant. Classes were/are dull, and I didn't feel any challenge to improve. So I sat where I was.

"It seems that you speak in onomatopeias. It's almost like you refuse to speak."
The moment she said this my brain went kaput just a little. I thought about it for the half a moment she gave me to think about it. It's true. I start a sentence and finish it with a sound. The sound means something, of course, but I should be using words instead.

"It's too bad because you're here to improve your French. We're here for you to talk to, for you to practice with. I understand if it's just you and you don't like talking, maybe you talk to your friends, i don't know. But as for me, I like having someone to talk to. It's important to get things out there. All the other girls used to just talk and talk...but you, you're silent."

I am silent. I set the bar at perfection, miss the bar, and then wallow in it. I feel so incredibly annoyed and angry with myself for doing that time and time again. I only have another month here, of course I've only in a very recent amount of time gotten myself completely at ease in what I do here. I gave up trying to understand why some profs were amazing and other profs suck. I stopped wishing that I actually had classes with friends (although technically that's not true--really I just stopped trying to figure out ways to change it. Most of the ways included subterfuge and yellow water balloons...useless in the face of the Tsking Demon Lady ).

During the course of the conversation today I was presented with an outside view of what I do to myself. Internalisation!! Woot! Who needs to tell other people about things if I can just write them in a hidden journal and pretend to stop thinking about them? The reason I didn't really try to fix the problem is that I thought everyone was used to being one way, and I hate to mess them up. Dumb, I know. Isn't the entire idea to change and grow and all? Yes. Yes it is.

Even talking with them, and trying to explain why I feel like I'm trapped in a miniature box of French vocabulary and hate making mistakes even though I know that you have to be mistaken in something before being able to fix it and move on to the next mistake, was incredibly difficult. I'm not used to adults I kinda-almost-generally know calling me out on things like this. No, I take that back. I'm not accustomed to (really) anybody doing this. I'm perfect, remember?

I don't understand why I act against things that I know. I know that it's stupid to be afraid of my mistakes. I know that it's idiotic to not speak a language I'm trying to learn. I know it's moronic to keep something I'm thinking about inside just because I don't think the sentence I want to use to express the feeling is grammatically correct.

Then why in the world do I just sit here in France fighting with myself?
It's a war with my own intellect!

I speak well. I speak just as well as everybody else, I'm not dumb, I understand everything that goes on around me (although one could argue that that's because Pierre and Lola haven't been around doing their speed talking for a while). So this is stupid. Why, when I want to ask if they think it's a good idea to rent a car and drive to the coast, I stop myself before anything gets out, and then get butterflies in my stomach while I stand there and fight with myself? I seriously have stalled for time and waited ten minutes for the perfect moment to pose the question "Can I use the printer?"

You think I'm exagerating? I am so not. Ugh. So dumb. Fear is so dumb.
It should have no hold over me, but it does. It really does. This is even after I told myself, so many times, that I didn't care. I was going to go for it and not care...I think I must have forgotten.

Also, I'm tired of only having a "virtual connection" to my friends and family at home. Seriously people, this is annoying. I finally did a conversation of half voice and half typing with Mackenzie the other day (she talked into her mic and I typed my answers as fast as I could into the little Skype box) and nearly started crying when I first heard her say "Hi!". I miss people's voices. I guess it's time to find a phone card. I was trying to save money, but I don't know if I can do this much longer...what, do I feel like I have to punish myself or something? haha

So yeah...I think we're going to rent a car for the next long weekend. I have five days off, and Collin did a little bit of research and says that it's cheap enough and that we should just do it. We'll be able to just drive to the coast and it'll be super easy. Coolness.